Gerald Brandacher is Scientific Director of the Johns Hopkins Composite Tissue Allotransplantation (CTA) program. He is also an Associate Professor of surgery at the Department of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Prior to joining Johns Hopkins in 2010, Dr. Brandacher was a Key Member of the hand transplant programs in Innsbruck, Austria, and at the University of Pittsburgh, where he headed the nation's first double hand transplant surgery and the first forearm transplant surgery. He was also instrumental in designing a novel cell-based immunomodulatory treatment protocol for CTA. His main scientific interests are donor-specific immune tolerance and immunomonitoring strategies and he has published extensively.